The Year’s Best Tech Quotes

Here are the ten best “tech” quotes of 2011, based on how much I like the line and how much it mattered.

10. “I actually worked on a whole bunch of patents in my career over the years and I have to say that every single patent is nothing but crap.”

A software engineer explains to This American Life that even he didn’t understand the patents he was granted. It was part of a seminal story about patent trolls and the way that a system designed to foster innovation can crush it.

9. “I appear to have bored you into silence.”

In a May, the journalist Clive Thompson confronted a sex bot and tried to unmask it. He proved that, for now at least, homo sapiens can still win arguments with machines.

Soon after tweeting out a picture of his undergarments to a college student, Congressman Anthony Weinerclaimed he’d been hacked.

7. “Today’s stock market actually hates technology.”

In August, as conversation about a new Internet bubble peeked, Marc Andreessen argued persuasively in the Wall Street Journal that many tech stocks are undervalued.

6. “There are only a few emotions that can effect change at a large organization. One is greed and another powerful one is fear.”

A Google engineer explains to the journalist Steven Levy why his company built a social network to compete with Facebook.

5. “I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”

Bill Gates tells Steve Jobs that it’s not fair to accuse Microsoft of ripping off Apple. The quote appeared in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Apple’s co-founder.

4. “Arrest us. We dare you. We are the unstoppable hacking generation and you are a wasted old sack of shit, Murdoch. ROW ROW FIGHT THE POWER!”

During the summer, a hacker collective called LulzSec wreaked havoc on large corporations and maintained an irreverent Twitter feed.

3. “You’re the baddest bitch.”

A college student explains to Sheryl Sandberg, the C.O.O. of Facebook and the most prominent woman in Silicon Valley, just how inspirational she is.

2. “Unfortunately my commitment to our business is still marginally higher than my commitment to fucking around.”

Andrew Mason, the C.E.O. of Groupon, talking to Silicon Alley Insider. His company—with its massive growth, rejection of Google’s proposed acquisition, troubles with the S.E.C., and I.P.O—provided one of the industry’s great dramas of the year.

1. “Bezos is super smart; don’t get me wrong. He just makes ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies.”

A Google employee, who used to work at Amazon, mistakenly publishes, on Google+, an epic rant he had written for co-workers, comparing his current and former companies. The essay brilliantly explains how Bezos transformed Amazon from a giant store into a platform on which much of the Web operates.